Lumber Van - Part II

We got a 12 ft cargo van yesterday morning (same van they gave me 2 weeks ago) and V and I loaded up all the maple flooring I collected over the past two weeks from a nearby dumpster (looks to be about 300 sq ft).  We didn't get a pic of the wood in the back of the van, but this is the wood after we moved it into the house - it is stacked on the upper landing outside the main floor.  To give you a sense of scale, the stack is about six feet long end to end and is four rows deep.  So it's a lot of wood!

Then we drove over to Jersey City to pick up the reclaimed cedar water tower staves I found on Craigslist. These are mostly 2"x5"s and there are are about 44 10ft lengths - but those have some rot about two feet from the end, so they are probably going to end up yielding about 6-7 feet of usable decking after cutting and planing.  We also got about 50 4 foot lengths which will lose about a foot each in the clean-up process.

Note that way way back in the load, just behind the seats, you can see some tin ceiling tiles that I picked up cheap on Craigslist this week in the neighborhood.

Finally, we picked up a table I bought on ebay 2 months ago.  The seller was in Ohio, but the guy who sold me the cedar hooked me up with someone who was driving back from Ohio on Thursday so, for a reasonable price, he picked it up in Ohio and dropped it off in Jersey City.  Note that the table top isn't pictured here - it is cast iron and weighs a ton so we left it outside - we're going to put some sort of custom (i.e., made by us!) wood table-top on this anyway.

And that was how we spent our day yesterday - loading all this stuff in and then out.

maple carload & flooring adhesive

So, I went back to that dumpster a couple more times and ended up with all THIS hard maple 4" T&G flooring:

Now all I need to do is figure out how to put it down with all this adhesive stuff on the bottom.

It feels kind or like dried rubber cement and when you rub it, it sort of comes off in little rubbery bits.
OH, and it smells pretty awful - but I figure that will go away when it dries completely.  Anyway, maybe all I need to do is put a rotary brush attachment on an angle grinder and hit it lightly to blow most of this stuff right off.  I'll give it a shot.
The smell, we'll just have to see about.

Lumber Van!!

We started the day early picking up a 12 foot cargo van way out in Queens.  We had reserved a 10 footer, but they were out so they gave us a 12, which was a good thing because we used every inch of it.

Our first stop was the garage in Williamsburg where we picked up the 500-600 square feet of reclaimed maple factory flooring that Lou and I bundled a few nights ago (that is the carefully stacked and tied stuff on the bottom of the van load).  This was a super cheap find on Craigslist - less than 55 cents per square foot.  Oh, and the seller threw in an old factory cart with big cast iron wheels on it - that thing weighs another hundred pounds easily.

Then we drove up to Greenwood Lake, NY and picked up about 220 square feet of reclaimed douglas fir flooring in one inch thick boards, three inches wide all in 7 foot and 8 foot lengths. Looks to be porch flooring. (This is the bunch of similar boards sitting right on top of the maple flooring). We also got a couple fat beams made of fir and oak. This was a free find on Craigslist.

Finally, we zipped up to Walden, NY where we picked up 25 pieces of 2"x4"x8' cedar decking along with a number of big cedar posts (including a 12 foot long 6"x6" post).  This was also a cheap find on Craigslist - the guy had leftovers from his own deck project. (This is all the stuff on top.)
So here it is, the parfait of lumber:



Oh, and we also had the disassembled Hoosier in there behind the driver seat.  And remember, this is a 12 foot cargo van - meaning that the cargo area is 12 feet deep.  Huge!

We had some help waiting for us at the house when we finally arrived so unloading was relatively painless.

There it is.